Lead glacier guide
EinarHallsson
“A glacier is a slow animal. If you hurry, it notices.”
- Based in
- Höfn, Iceland
- Guiding since
- 2008
- Languages
- Icelandic, English, German
- Leads
- Ice Caves of Vatnajökull
About Einar
Einar grew up on a farm at Hoffell, 15 km from the Hoffellsjökull snout. His grandfather used to walk to the ice in an hour. Today it takes Einar twenty minutes by truck and then forty on foot, because the glacier has withdrawn more than two kilometres since his grandfather’s day.
He guided his first school group onto the ice at 17, trained as a mountain guide in Norway, and has led for Nordvik since the first season in 2012. He is a volunteer with the Höfn search and rescue team, and he checks every cave himself on the morning of the walk.
Outside the winter season he builds dry-stone walls and keeps eleven sheep. He says the two jobs have the same lesson: read the ground before you lift anything.
The cave that closed
In January 2024 Einar spent three mornings in a row checking a cave on Breiðamerkurjökull that looked perfect from a distance. On the third morning there was a new crack running through the roof, as thin as a pencil line. He turned the group around. Two weeks later the roof came down.
“People ask me whether it is disappointing when we do not go in,” he says. “I tell them that a cave you do not enter is a cave still there next year.”
Leads
Ice Caves of Vatnajökull
6 days, Dec to Mar, from €3,450
